Gentle Readers,

It is good to have friends. I am nestled in an eiderdown of snow in central Virginia. The federal government is closed today. I have no way to tell the difference. Now, to Marlow….

This is from a 1999 motorcycle trip journal.

– Marlow

January 2019
Random thoughts at the end of a road trip
Coastal Empire

Farewell, to the fantastic vistas, free every morning, waiting just outside town with the morning sunlight, the forest scent, and the regional ethnic diner food like I’d never tasted before. Farewell, to the worn down, night shift motel clerks offering clean cotton sheets atop big queen-sized beds. Farewell, to the fresh local meat raised five miles away and slaughtered at the local butcher shop. Fresh from the field potatoes, green beans and homemade, crumbled, fruit desserts atop red checked, oil table clothed, picnic tables at which I ate elbow to elbow with local field hands, laborers and tradesmen. Farewell, to the road-hogging slow tractor and combine drivers with the straw hats and overalls, as they ambled down the road on their way to the next field. Farewell, to the pre-dawn aromas coming from a town’s only bakery — cakes, pies, treats and donuts that would be on the counter 6 AM sharp to give the town its brief daily taste of nirvana. Farewell, to those smiling folk along every road I roamed. Farewell, to the sights and aromas of freshly plowed fields, old growth forests, and endless fields of roses ready for distant cut-flower markets. And farewell, to that first-class motorcycle saddle, that wrapped my bony posterior with the necessaries that enabled 16 hour riding days and tight cornering at excessively high speeds up and down mountainsides.

Soon I would be adjusting my living room recliner, and having a sip of that welcome home celebration champagne, and perhaps I would have an inkling . . . that I finally had seen some snippet of . . . or maybe I knew where the next road trip would go.

Road trip journal

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